A work in process. Thoughts, reflections and ideas on librarianship from the English-speaking Caribbean. Entries will be revised and edited as thoughts become clearer and sharper, until eventually they are perfectly expressed in writing.

Friday, March 30, 2012

At an ASIST student meeting we are talking about how
we can better integrate library practice with research. The issue of
library education being separated from the pracitce was also discussed.

One
person raised the issue of having library education being modelled
after medical education. Doctors who teach are situated in hospitals and
their students have days that they walk around with their teachers and
get to apply what they learn.

Why not have library
educators situated in libraries, and have some teaching days where
students are actually spending time doing work in the actual library?

Just providing a brief update on my messy thesis concept. Right now
it has evolved into the idea of using folkloric artificial intelligent
conversational agents for transmitting business information for micro-enterprise owners.

For the summer, I am hoping to look at literature on
folklore being used to convey business information and/or use in online
information services. By folklore - I am narrowing down to the use of
folkloric storytelling and proverbs as well as the role of natural
conversation in using these methods to convey information to
micro-enterprise owners.

Also looking for theory to support this perspective. Thoughts, suggestions, or literature welcomed.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

I am currently exploring the process of creating a chatbot for information provision, with view to apply it to my thesis and secondly to discuss its application to libraries in providing a new small business online information service.

So far, I am basing the chatbot as a question answering interface to Government documents for business users. My hope is to create the interface to answer questions by users regarding a Government process. In a sense, this moves into e-governance and the access to e-government information/ or simply the access to information.

So far, one of the issues that I have come across is the issue of updates. When basing the information for a business query on a government online source, in the case that I am doing, the particular Jamaican government agency has had a name change. Since the old/former name is in the document that I am attempting to use to feed my chatbot, one wonders when last the site was updated and how this could be a liability to libraries providing this service.

About Me

I am from Kingston, Jamaica in the West Indies/Caribbean,where I did my
undergraduate and masters at the University of the West Indies, Mona
campus in Library & Information Studies. I possess also an interest in entrepreneurship, social media and recently artificial intelligent conversational/virtual agents.